My Reading List (and Favorite Thriller) of 2025

I’ve got really sick – fantastically sick – of best books of the year lists.

First of all, none of us can read or listen to enough worthy books in any genre to really know what the “best” books are. Second, in my view, readers and reviewers alike seem to be swayed by the hype surrounding the releases of established authors no longer penning their best work. Third, there’s a US-UK divide in readers’ preferences, which distorts how people rate novels.

So this blog isn’t a proclamation of the best crime novels of 2025. Too many thrillers are published each year for anyone to make such a claim. (And the most heavily hyped novels are usually established authors whose recent works are as thrilling as a bowl of cold pablum.) Instead, this is a reflection on my year in reading, including my “favorite” crime novel from 2025.

I’ve read about 80 books this year, divided evenly between print and audiobooks, and most have been crime fiction. About a dozen of these have been published in 2025, which admittedly is a miserably small sample size when you consider how many books are churned out each year.  I padded my numbers with a few short novels (Turn of the Screw, Animal Farm) but my reading included all 1,200 pages of The Count of Monte Cristo. I read a Dickens novel each year, and this year it was one of his shorter works, Hard Times. The number includes my wife’s psychological thriller The Pet-Sit, but not my technothriller Presidio Biotech.  I wish I’d read more non-fiction. And I’m behind on contemporary literary fiction as well.

For my tastes, the biggest disappointments of the year were established authors who are writing flawed works and getting away with it. Devoted fans still love them. They still do well on the bestsellers lists. Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets comes immediately to mind, mainly because of the painful excesses in exposition and glaring holes in the plot. Michael Connelly (my favorite crime writer) produced not one but two good novels in Nightshade and The Proving Ground. But “good” is substandard for a writer of Connelly’s talent. Scott Turow with Presumed Guilty is still crafting engaging courtroom stories, but still robs them of drama by failing to stack the odds against his hero. Harlan Coben, however, had a really good novel with Nobody’s Fool. (I didn’t bother reading the book he wrote with Reese Witherspoon as I’m already sick of the dismal greed of pairing up celebrities with crime writers to milk readers.)

Late in the year, I read a few leading crime writers from Britain and Ireland, and their prose is wonderful. I wish I could write like them. But I find that the writers and reviewers from these islands place such a great emphasis on good writing that they tend to overlook the fundamentals, like a sound plot, coherent narrative and character development.

I found a few under-rated novels like Beneath her Skin by C.S. Porter and Paula Hawkins’ The Blue Hour (The lone 2024 novel I’ll mention here). I don’t get all the hate that’s out there for Hawkins’ more recent novels. She’s a tremendous novelist. Heartwood by Amity Gaige was a wonderful book, but not quite dark enough for the crime fiction genre. I could say the same about The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer, but Bauer is just so wonderfully quirky that I always love her writing.

In the end it came down to two candidates for my favorite crime novel of the year, and I’m hard-pressed to decide between the two of them. They’re written by two novelists who are at the absolute top of their games these days, and I can’t wait to dive into their next books. I’ve bestowed my Favorite Book of 2025 title (and all the prestige that comes with it) on the less celebrated of the two books, because my second-favorite has received enough adulation already.

My silver medal goes to King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby, which is deservedly appearing on a lot of year-end lists. Cosby is an absolutely fantastic novelist, and King of Ashes has elements that exceed his other works.

S.A. Cosby burst on the scene a few years back as a bold new voice in crime fiction, and he has maintained stellar consistency that few novelists achieve. His latest tells the story of the Carruthers family, which operates a crematorium in rural Virginia. Roman Carruthers left the family home to become a yuppie financial adviser in Atlanta, but he’s drawn home after his father ends up in a coma after a hit-and-run, and his brother Dante is in debt to a ruthless mob.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is Cosby’s best novel, but his writing has gone in some new directions with King of Ashes. First, it’s his most hip and urban novel, with the scenes in Atlanta and Roman’s flashy lifestyle. Beyond that, Cosby has added a fresh dimension to his prose. He writes with his customarily tremendous grit, but his prose is more literary than in the past. The motif of fire, brought out first in the family’s business, runs throughout the text. Then he layers his writing throughout with allusions to Rome and Renaissance Italy. The names Roman and Dante start it all off. He does all of this without straining the narrative at all, adding just a little bit of majesty to his already wonderful style.

And my favorite crime novel of 2025? That would be Crooks by Lou Berney. It’s the story of the Mercurio family, a tribe of charming sociopaths who flee from Las Vegas to Oklahoma City, where they open a night club. A movie pitch for this book would be something like the Brady Bunch meets The Godfather, only with a screenplay by a comedy writer. This is a screamingly funny novel. It doesn’t suffer from the inane banter that crime novelists usually employ to give their characters a supposed sense of humor. It uses situation and dialogue to actually make the reader laugh.

The father (a mob wise-guy called Buddy) is in a begrudging marriage with a charming pickpocket called Lillian. Their kids are for the most part – you guessed it – crooks. Handsome and genial Jeremy ends up in Hollywood, while the family daredevil Tallulah seeks her fortune in Moscow. The best character has the fewest lines – the dumb and muscly oldest son Ray. The brainy Alice becomes a lawyer and the professorial Piggy is startlingly straightlaced.

To my mind, Berney is one of the most under-rated writers in the market today. (For example, 44,685 readers rated King of Ashes on Goodreads, while Crooks garnered 882 ratings.) A winner of the Edgar Award for Crime Novels in 2016, Berney deserves to be top tier. With November Road in 2021, he proved he can write noir that’s as gritty as Don Winslow, and now with Crooks he’s as witty as Carl Hiaasen.

Click here for the full list of the books I’ve read in 2025.

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Peter Moreira’s latest novel is the technothriller Presidio Biotech. He is also the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to my home page to join my mailing list and receive a free prequel novella.